by Michael Ford
“Everyone, hide!” shouted Leon to the people doing their laundry, though the order was pointless. They were already running, screaming, for a door at the far end of the laundromat. Slabs of brickwork broke off around the window as the Snatcher battled to get into the room.
Kobi shivered at the thud of Snatcher darts, and the smashing of broken washing machine glass surrounded him. “Keep low!” he said. They followed the fleeing crowd through a set of double doors into a small kitchen, then through a set of hanging plastic drapes into a storeroom lined with crates.
“It’s still coming!” cried Rohan.
The double door burst inward. The Snatcher lowered its head to fit through, feet skittering on the tiled floor. Kobi and the others rushed out a fire escape into a small backstreet filled with trash cans, then slammed the barred door closed behind them. Yaeko was waiting for them.
“The extraction team will be here any minute,” she said.
The Snatcher thumped into the other side of the door, shaking it in its frame. Then again. Kobi and Leon threw themselves against it. “We can’t hold it off for long,” Leon said. A third impact knocked them all backward. Kobi expected the Snatcher to erupt through, but nothing happened. For a few seconds they all watched the door, breathing hard.
“Is it gone?” asked Leon.
“I think so,” Rohan said.
Kobi wasn’t so sure. He’d never known a Snatcher to give up the chase. They were relentless.
The growl of engines sounded from the end of the street, and four dirt bikes skidded around the corner. The extraction team! The bikes slewed to a halt, and the lead rider pushed back her visor.
“Get on!” she said.
In one smooth movement, Yaeko leaped onto the back of one of the bikes, and Leon climbed up behind another driver. But Kobi hesitated. “Use your surroundings, Kobi. Always look for opportunity.” As he listened to Hales’s voice in his head, he ran over to the trash cans. Rohan followed him. “What’s up, Caveman?”
“Shields,” Kobi said simply. He took off the lids from the trash cans and passed one to Rohan, then he ran over to Yaeko and Leon.
“Hurry up!” said the fourth Sol agent, waiting on his bike.
“What are these for?” asked Leon.
Rohan moved like a blur, throwing his arm across Leon’s body. Kobi saw a dart clatter into the metal lid.
“That!” said Kobi.
Kobi twisted his neck to see where the dart had come from. Both Snatchers were zooming over the rooftops toward them, at a height of about ten yards. Their tails arced over their backs, firing darts as they flew.
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!
Kobi raised his trash can lid and felt the projectile hit. Rohan blocked another, and a third whistled into the chassis of Leon’s bike. Thanks, Hales, Kobi thought. His heart thudded, but his vision was clear, and he prepared for another shot, holding up the lid.
“Can we go already?” yelled Yaeko.
Kobi felt the bike lurch and gripped his rider to stay in the saddle. They bounced over the uneven terrain, throwing up dust. People scampered out of the way ahead. Kobi kept his eyes fixed on the sky, watching the Snatchers in pursuit. They were edging lower and firing darts all the time. Kobi kept the shield raised, just in case, but the darts missed him. His bike shot ahead of Leon’s, taking the lead, and they steered a tight angle down another street. The Snatchers rounded the corner in perfect formation, lifelessly calm and all the deadlier for it.
“Leon, use that shocker!” Kobi shouted.
“They’re too far up!” he called back.
One of the Snatchers broke away, perpendicular to their path, and vanished out of sight.
“It’s trying to cut us off,” said Kobi.
When he caught sight of the giant drone again, it was already a block ahead, moving parallel on another street. The one in pursuit suddenly dipped until it was trailing them almost at ground level, legs tucked under its carapace. Its staring eyes seemed fixed on Kobi’s bike. It wants me. He felt his muscles tense with latent power. I’m ready for you. With a burst of acceleration it shot toward him.
With no other weapon, Kobi hurled the trash can lid. It smashed into one of the Snatcher’s eyes. The drone dipped, one flank catching the ground and throwing up sparks. It flipped over, crashing through the front of a building. The Snatcher exploded, the heat making Kobi close his eyes, and he felt the sting of debris cutting his face.
“Don’t ever drop your guard . . . ,” Kobi scolded himself.
“Until you’re sure the threat has passed.” Hales’s voice finished it for him in his mind.
Kobi braced himself just in time as he turned back, and the bike suddenly skidded. His knee almost grazed the road. His senses felt overloaded, but the driver managed to stop and keep the bike upright.
“Not good,” said Rohan from his bike, which stopped at Kobi’s side.
The second Snatcher squatted ahead of them. Its stinger flexed, and before it could even aim, Leon was running right at it, his trash can lid held in front of his head, and roaring a battle cry. Darts cut through the air, clattering off the shield as he charged into the Snatcher’s head. A crash of splintered metal, and the drone’s legs buckled.
“He got it!” Rohan said, but even as he spoke, the Snatcher reared up, flinging Leon onto the ground. Rohan started to run to his friend’s aid as Leon tried to scramble away, and the mangled Snatcher loomed over him, feet stabbing into the dusty ground.
But Kobi held Rohan back, then took his shield. He hurled the lid, and it completely smashed away a foreleg, tearing through the metal. Still the Snatcher advanced on Leon, beeping maniacally. Dread surged through Kobi, and he knew it was too late to help their friend.
He sprang forward desperately, covering ten yards in two strides, but he knew it wouldn’t be enough. He wouldn’t get there in time. Leon crawled back, screaming. “No!” shouted Kobi. A strange shimmer spread like a heat haze over the wall beside the drone.
Yaeko appeared. She had an electric baton in her hand and pointed it at the Snatcher’s neck. “You’ve really got to take a hint,” she said to the drone. The metal creature spasmed, its legs curling beneath it, then lurched sideways into rusted scaffolding attached to a two-story brick warehouse. The whole building rippled.
Yaeko jumped back as a mound of bricks and metal poles crashed down over the Snatcher’s body. Kobi was already there pulling Leon aside. The mound of broken building moved faintly as the Snatcher struggled beneath it.
One of the motorbike riders pulled up his visor and said in a deep, rumbling voice, “Do these things not die?”
“Oh, they die,” said Kobi. He picked up one of the scaffolding poles and chucked it to Leon. Leon grinned. The Snatcher writhed to the surface of the debris. Leon gritted his teeth as he put all his weight into the blow, stabbing the pole deep into the Snatcher’s cluster of eyes, back into its main circuits. It sagged to the ground, strange chittering sounds coming from its insides. Slowly, the light in its eyes dimmed.
“What happened to the other one?” asked Rohan.
“I took care of it,” Kobi said. But looking back, he saw the other Snatcher clambering toward them like a wounded animal still determined to fight.
“Okay,” he said, “I take that back.”
The wailing beeping and whir of its movements caused an instinctive shiver of horror to ratchet through Kobi’s body. Sounds he’d dreaded since he could remember, sounds that said, “Run. Hide. Pray.” Kobi felt sudden rage, even though he knew the Snatcher was just a mindless machine. He remembered how terrified he’d been of Snatchers back in the Wastelands—the nightmares that had woken him screaming in his bed at Bill Gates High. Why couldn’t they just leave him alone? He climbed down from the bike and approached the lumbering contraption.
Was CLAWS watching? Maybe even Melanie Garcia herself? Kobi stared into the device. “One day, I’ll find you, Melanie. One day you will pay.”
“What are you doing?” said one of t
he riders. “Stay away from that thing. It’s still dangero—” A Snatcher leg lashed out weakly. Kobi caught it in his hands, watching the hydraulic claw open and close as if still trying to grab him. With a brutal twist he wrenched the leg from its housing, then swung it with all his strength at the creature’s head. The first strike smashed the eye. He drew back, fueled by anger, and struck again, crushing the metal inward. Fizzing sparks showered out. Kobi swung a third time, and it was enough to make the Snatcher fall onto its side, the last four legs trembling as its systems shut down.
“Whoa,” said Leon. “Feel better now?”
“A little,” said Kobi, looking at the defeated Snatcher.
“They’ll send more,” said the Sol motorbike driver with the deep voice—clearly the leader. “We have to go.”
Kobi, Leon, and Yaeko climbed back onto their bikes, and the riders took off again at breakneck speed.
“Take the alleys,” said Kobi. “We’ll be shielded from their visual sensors.” Kobi clung on as the sides of the alleys zipped by—it seemed impossible that they could move so fast through this maze of ramshackle buildings. Kobi noticed that a screen on the bike seemed to map the roads ahead in 3D. Writing on the screen read, “Auto-Drive.”
From the angle of the sun and the brief glimpses of the central district Kobi saw through gaps in the slum buildings, he knew they were heading back toward the garage where they’d exited the Sol base. After a couple of turns they entered a street almost completely sheltered under awnings. Sol must have put them up to cover the street from surveillance from above.
The bikes slowed, their engines a soft rumble, as they turned up a slight incline and into the workshop beneath a sign: “Jack’s Garage.” Kobi’s driver cut the engine and kicked down the kickstand. Kobi leaped off. His whole body shook with adrenaline, and for the first time in a long while he felt alive. But he knew they’d been lucky. He wasn’t looking forward to seeing Mischik.
The surveillance van was already parked in the garage. Asha jumped from the back, looking flustered. Spike clambered down after, grinning as he chewed a piece of gum.
“Are you guys okay?” Asha said. She came to Kobi first, looking him over for wounds. “We were watching everything through the ocular lenses.”
“Awesome job, big guy!” said Spike to Kobi. “Man, that Snatcher fight was next-level. Hey, better switch off those lenses now.” He tapped something on his smart watch, then said, “Deactivate ocular cameras.” He winked at Kobi. “Don’t want Mischik watching while you’re in the john.”
Kobi’s rider dismounted and pulled off her helmet. She was a tall Asian woman, sweat plastering her hair to her scalp. “I can’t believe we made it,” she said with a smile at Kobi. “Thanks to you kids. What you did back there to those Snatchers . . . I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Pah, that was nothing,” said Leon. His rider was the tall one with the deep voice: a bearded man with a scar over one eyebrow. “We need to report to Mischik. The fallout of this thing is going to be huge.”
“Tell me about it,” said Spike.
A medic emerged from the school bus that hid the secret entrance to the tunnels, and he began to check over the other kids.
“We’re fine,” said Yaeko abruptly. Kobi wondered if she felt guilty for alerting the Snatchers with her behavior toward the holo-commercial of Niki. Kobi could see that patches of skin around her face and neck were blending in with the metallic sheen of the garage, like she wanted to disappear. Kobi wanted to tell her that the holo-ads had confused him too, and if she hadn’t been on the rooftops leading them, they never would have escaped the Snatchers. She’d made up for her mistake. But before he could approach, Leon was slapping him on the back.
“Asha, you should have seen Kobi. He beat a Snatcher to death with its own leg!”
Asha didn’t look impressed. “Mischik wants us back in the base,” she said, heading toward the school bus. “He’s not happy.”
Kobi swallowed. He wasn’t looking forward to the debrief.
They’d begun to walk toward the bus when he heard someone fall behind him. Rohan was on his hands and knees, like he’d tripped. Leon rolled his eyes and sighed dramatically. “Rohan, we survive a Snatcher attack and you can’t handle walking in a straight line?” But then he paused, eyes fixing on one spot before his face screwed up and he cried out, “Rohan!”
Then Kobi saw the dart protruding from the back of Rohan’s calf. His pants were stained with blood.
“You’ve been hit!” said Leon. “We need to get him to medical—quickly!” In a second he was by his friend’s side, crouching and levering his shoulder under Rohan’s ribs before easing him up, carrying him like a child. “You’re going to be okay, buddy.”
Kobi spoke urgently to Rohan. “Stay with us, Rohan. You’re going to be okay.” But the words sounded thin. Rohan’s arms dangled, and his eyes were closed. “Rohan, you have to stay awake!”
Asha had already dashed through the bus, and she threw open the hatch to the Sol tunnels, letting Leon carry Rohan through. Yaeko watched on silently. She had shifted her skin pigment to a sunflower yellow, blending almost completely into the school bus behind her.
“I didn’t mean to,” she whispered. “I didn’t. . . .”
Kobi’s gaze paused on her for a moment. Then he turned and followed the others back into the base.
“I never should have let you go.”
Mischik had said the same thing, in slightly different ways, three or four times already as he paced up and down outside the corridor of the base’s medical wing. Leon was hunched on the ground, his head bowed. Yaeko had appeared a little while after the others, watching silently. Kobi and Asha stared through the pane of glass set into the wall, where they could see Rohan lying silently on a bed, a mask over his mouth, monitors fastened to his bare chest, and with a drip in his arm. He hadn’t moved or opened his eyes.
“What was I thinking?” said Mischik. “Okafor was right. No, I was right! I shouldn’t have let you talk me into this.” Kobi felt a jolt of hurt at the thought that Mischik was blaming him for Rohan’s condition. But he let it go. This wasn’t the time to argue about whose fault it was.
“Is he going to be okay?” Asha asked, chewing the inside of her cheek. Her dark eyes were watery.
Mischik took a deep breath, apparently cooling himself off. “The doctors are working as fast as they can. From what Kobi’s told us, we need to neutralize it soon, or his vital organs could begin to shut down.”
Kobi gave a small nod. Hales had analyzed the Snatcher toxin from the damaged CLAWS drone they had scavenged and then disassembled in the workshop at Bill Gates High.
“We’ve stabilized him,” continued Mischik. “But he’s still critical. We’ve administered a high dose of the Horizon Waste cleansers in hopes that might counteract the toxin. Kobi’s blood can neutralize all poisonous chemicals quickly, not just Waste.”
Kobi nodded again, but he could read Mischik’s face, and he knew what the man was thinking. CLAWS would have prepared the Snatchers to target Kobi, which meant the darts would have been designed to be so strong that they would overpower Kobi’s antibodies.
Mischik’s watch communicator buzzed, and he looked impatiently at the screen. “I have to go deal with the fallout from the clinic,” he said. “The slums are flooding with drones, and we need to call back all our active operations. All of you, wait here. You need to be checked out by the docs too.” He strode away.
“He’ll be okay, right?” Kobi saw that Yaeko had approached tentatively. Her face was hard, but her voice was soft and her words shook. “With Kobi’s blood, he’ll pull through.”
Leon looked up, eyes red. “If he does, it’ll be no thanks to you.”
“Hey, easy!” said Asha.
“Well, someone’s gotta say it,” said Leon. “What were you thinking, standing there gawking out in the open like that?”
“I thought it was really Niki!” said Yaeko.
Leon
stood up and jabbed a finger toward her. “So what if it was? She’s not on our side, remember? She chose CLAWS.”
Yaeko stared back defiantly, her skin rippling red and orange. “It’s not about sides,” she snapped. “You’re so simpleminded. Why don’t you go and watch one of your dumb action movies? Something you might understand.” Even Kobi could tell Yaeko was lashing out as a defense mechanism, but she was only making things worse.
Kobi stepped between them. “Cool it. It’s not helping.”
“I understand orders!” Leon rose to his feet, ignoring Kobi. “I understand, ‘Stay out of sight.’ What’s your excuse, lizard-breath?”
“That’s enough!” said Kobi. “Rohan wouldn’t want you squabbling like this, would he? Yaeko made a mistake, but none of us knew what it was going to be like out there. We didn’t know the Snatchers would come so fast.” Kobi had been taught to think rationally, to not let emotion cloud his judgment. Sometimes he wished everyone else had been too.
Leon blinked slowly. A vein at the side of his forehead was throbbing. “Rohan wouldn’t be in there if it weren’t for her,” he said. “It’s her fault. She’s never been one of us. She wants to go back to CLAWS with her best friend, Niki. Maybe she did it on purpose.”
Yaeko’s jaw tightened. “Maybe I did!” she yelled.
Leon shoved past Kobi, going for Yaeko, but she leaped over him, her suction finger pads gripping the ceiling. She dropped to the floor in a fluid crouch, then strode away without looking back. Kobi grabbed Leon by the shoulders before he could go after her. Leon spun and shoved Kobi with a force that took the breath from his lungs. Before he knew it, Kobi was on the floor, skidding down the corridor.
“You should be happy!” Leon shouted at Kobi, tears breaking from his eyes in a sudden stream. “This was your idea! We wouldn’t have gone out there if you could keep still. You said it would be fine! You said . . .” He gave a last long look at Rohan, then hurried away.
Kobi got to his feet, rubbing at the bruising over his chest.
“Let him go,” Asha said. “It’s not worth fighting.”